Solomons Seal (11 page)

‘Unusual, isn't it? And the way it came to me was unusual.' He turned to a filing cabinet and began rummaging through a thick wad of letters.

‘You don't happen to have any more of those ship labels, do you?' I asked hopefully.

He laughed and shook his head. ‘Wish I had. I did well out of that sale. But if I'd had any more, I'd have probably sold them anyway. A man came here two or three months ago … Ah, here we are.' And he handed me a letter written on cheap paper with a Mission address stamped on it in purple.

I am writing on behalf of Mr Minya Lewis
, it began, and a little further down I found the information Keegan wanted …
his mother died in Cooktown on February 16 of last year. Being her only
son and his father not having been heard from since 1911, I am satisfied that he has right of possession to anything that was hers, and particularly to this letter which was in his father's writing. She was apparently a very old woman and he found the letter in a box under her bed. As I believe there is some value in old stamps
…

Lewis! Was this the same Lewis that Chips had talked about, the half-breed aborigine who had killed a man named Black Holland? ‘Can I have this photocopied?' I asked.

He hesitated, then gave a little shrug. ‘You can keep it if you wish. I can't see that it's any use to me now.' He asked me about the collection I had mentioned, and when I had satisfied his curiosity, he insisted on showing me some of his recent purchases. In the end I came out with a real bargain, a superb mint pair of the first issue Turks and Caicos Islands 3s. purple showing salt-raking against the background of a ship under sail; also a used set of the Papua New Guinea first issue of 1952, which attracted me because they were line-engraved and all of them different, the full set of fifteen stamps conveying a vivid picture of the strange primitive world that lay less than a thousand miles north-east of where I would be in two days' time.

I must have been in that shop over an hour, for the evening rush hour had started when I reached the Ferry Terminal, intent on checking the docks to see if Holland's ship was still there. But though the ferry I boarded gave me a good view of the docks, I saw
nothing that resembled a landing craft, the ships all too big to be trading in the islands. It was dark by the time we docked at the quay again, a cold, blustery evening. I took a taxi across Pyrmont Bridge to Union Street, found a way into the docks and began searching the wharves on foot. My mood was quite different now, despite the wind and the bitter cold. Chance had presented me with a priceless opportunity, a ship I understood was bound for the Pacific islands. What more could I ask? I felt she must be there, and in the end I was proved right. I found her at last, up in the northern end of the docks, lying with her square stern close against some dilapidated sheds in a part of the docks that hadn't been modernised, one of the Mark VIII LCTs, and she had HOLLAND LINE slapped across her rusty side in red.

There was no glimmer of light showing, and when I tried to go on board, I was shouted at by an old man with a beard who was walking a mongrel bitch as old and shaggy as himself among the empty beer cans littering the dirty quay. He knew nothing about the owners, wasn't interested. The agents had given him the job, and as long as he was the watchman nobody went on board without written permission from them. The only information I got from him was that the engineers were still working on her.

I walked slowly the length of the vessel, recalling the cramped quarters, running my eye over her battered plates. She looked old and tired, which was hardly surprising, considering she had been built over thirty years ago. But at least the bridge housing looked
well cared for. Her name, painted in black on the stern, was just visible below the flukes of the stern anchor:
Perenna – Buka.
The fact that Holland, after purchasing the vessel presumably from the Ministry of Defence, had re-named her for his sister started me thinking about her, wondering whether she had got my letter yet, if she was even now on her way to join him here.

Before returning to my hotel, I asked the watchman the name of the agents, and all the way back, walking briskly through the lit city with ragged clouds glowing red and the moon showing intermittently between their torn edges, I was remembering other nights of velvet humidity when I had stood on the compass platform of just such a ship conning her through the Molucca Straits. The things you do as a youngster remain incredibly vivid, and the more I thought about it, the more I was attracted to the idea of trying for a passage on the
Perenna
when the engine overhaul was finished. There was always the possibility that job prospects in the Solomons might be better than they seemed to be in Australia. But I knew bloody well the real reason was curiosity and the thought that if I could stay close to her brother, I might see her again, perhaps even be able to help her.

I rang the agents from the airport next morning, but was told the man dealing with the
Perenna
was out. Whoever it was speaking could give me no information about her sailing date, and when I asked whether it was Holland himself who had brought the ship to Sydney, he wanted to know my business and
why I was making enquiries about her. In the end he suggested I ring again later and put the phone down.

By then my plane was being called, and once we were airborne I put all thought of the ship out of my mind, concentrating on Munnobungle and the notes in my briefcase. The sun was shining when we landed in Brisbane, and I spent most of the afternoon in the Kostas Polites office going over the details with Ted Cooper. We finally agreed that the auction should be in Brisbane on August 22, six weeks being, in his view, the minimum required to obtain full coverage for the sale in such a large area as Queensland. That evening he and his wife gave me an excellent dinner of mud crabs in a restaurant overlooking the Brisbane River, and the following day I went on to Townsville.

Townsville was the nearest airport to Munnobungle, and McIver, the station manager, was there to meet me. I found him in the airport lounge, a craggy, sun-dried Australian in khaki shorts and open-necked shirt. He was in conversation with a black man neatly dressed in a tropical suit that was almost sky blue, a marked contrast to McIver's sweat-stained bush gear. ‘You want a beer before we start?' he asked in a grating voice without any friendliness in it.

‘Just as you like.' He had every reason to resent my arrival, and I was wondering how best to handle him.

‘Well, I bloody do. Had a flat on my way in, so I only just got here in time.' He went over to the bar and came back with two cans and glasses. The black
man had drifted off, and we drank in silence. Finally McIver said, ‘How's Rowlinson?'

‘All right,' I said. And because I wanted to get things straight at the start, I added, ‘Look, the fact that he's selling has got nothing to do with the result for last year. He doesn't want to sell, but he's under pressure – from his wife, and from his business associates.'

‘That's what he wrote, but it's hard to believe. I liked the bastard, and I thought he understood. You'll see when you get to Munnobungle. It's a tough station.'

There were quite a few people waiting in the terminal, many of them black, some very black indeed with frizzy hair. ‘Most of the people here are from Papua New Guinea,' McIver said, making an effort at conversation. ‘The Port Moresby plane is in, and they're waiting to board.'

‘Are there many of them in Australia?' I asked him, thinking of the man Chips had called Black Holland.

‘Not many in Australia, but here in Queensland, oh my word, yes. They come over to work in the sugar plantations. Not that fella I was talking to, he's a PNG government official. Been down in Sydney buying road-building equipment.'

The loudspeaker suddenly burst into voice, announcing the departure of the Air Niugini flight for Port Moresby. The black men began gathering up their belongings, and I watched them move to the exit. McIver said something, but I didn't hear it, lost in the knowledge that here I was at the gateway to that
primitive world so beautifully depicted on the stamps I had bought, the world that Chips had talked about with such nostalgia. ‘Another year,' McIver was saying, ‘an' I reck'n we'd have turned the corner.'

‘That's got nothing to do with it,' I told him irritably.

‘No? Then why doesn't he come out himself, tell me what the problem is to my face?'

‘Rowlinson's got a business to run in England. He hasn't the time.'

‘So Munnobungle was just a bloody toy. Is that what you're saying?'

‘If you like to put it that way.'

‘Jesus! An' I've worked my guts out … '

We finished our beer in silence and went out to the parking lot. The Fokker Friendship was taxiing now. It took off just as we were driving out of the airport, and seeing its wings glinting silver in the sun as it banked eastward over the sea, I was wishing I were in it, not seated in a dirty utility with a disgruntled man who was worried about the future.

We were headed west, and it was a long, dusty ride, gravel rattling against the mudguards, the last twenty miles all dirt. Having seen the deeds and maps, his reports, all the figures, I thought I knew what Munnobungle would be like. But I was wrong. Nothing, not even Chips's description of it and the fact that three sheep to the hectare was the best they could do, had prepared me for the aridity of the place. They had had almost a month without rain, which was unusual in winter, and the place was little better
than a dustbowl, the scrubland running out to a distant view of purpling hills, and everything hazed in the sun's glare with the leaves of the eucalypts shimmering to a slight breeze.

I spent three days there, driving more than 100 miles in the Land Rover and covering most of the 60,000-odd hectares. And the more I saw of it, the more I wondered how Chips had ever imagined he could make a profit and who the hell would be fool enough to buy it off him. The percentage rake-off he had promised me faded like a desert mirage. ‘Looks different when we've had some rain,' McIver said hopefully that first evening. And his wife, a quiet, solid woman, added, ‘It's real beaut then, the grass coming green, and the flowers.' They had two young kids, a boy and a girl. They were a nice family, and I was sorry for them, hoping that whoever bought the station would let them stay on. They seemed to love the place, something it was hard for me to appreciate, seeing it in a dry spell with nothing growing and the sheep looking gaunt and half-starved.

But by the third day Munnobungle was beginning to get under my skin – the wide skies, the sense of space, and the birds flocking round Deadman's Hole, a pool in a dry tributary of the Burdekin. It was only 5 miles from the homestead and about the only water I saw on the place. I was riding a horse that day and beginning to understand why Chips had so enjoyed the time he'd spent on the station.

It was my last day there, and that evening I persuaded McIver to drive me over to the hotel at
Mushroom Rock on the Burdekin, which was the nearest place I could buy him a beer. I still needed clarification on some of the sale details I had prepared, and I thought it would be easier to discuss them away from the homestead. By then he had become resigned to the inevitable, and we were on reasonably friendly terms, so that when I had got the information I required, I began to tell him about my own problems. I think that was when I first saw him smile. ‘So we're both of us in the same boat, eh, wondering where the hell we go from here?'

He was no help to me, merely repeating what the estate agents had said, but more colourfully and in greater detail. ‘It's a tough life, a tough country. No place for a Pommie unless he's got a helluva lot of capital and doesn't mind how much he loses.' When I asked him about the islands, he shrugged. ‘There's the copper-mining and plantations, that's about it. Some smart boys, Canadians some of them, are doing well selling to the indigenous population. That's in PNG, government contracts mainly. It's what I hear anyway. I never bin there. But I might,' he added thoughtfully. ‘I might pack it in here and try my luck, ‘cept that I got a family to provide for.'

I told him about the Holland Line then, and asked him whether he knew anything about it, or the family. But he shook his head. ‘There was a Holland on Bougainville became something of a war hero. One of the coast watchers. I remember my father talking about him. Stayed on when all the others had left and fought his own private war.'

‘Was that Colonel Lawrence Holland?'

‘Could be.' He nodded. ‘He was a colonel, that I do remember.'

‘Did Rowlinson mention a man named Black Holland?' I asked.

‘Yes, that's right. He did.' He frowned. ‘I remember now. He came back full of some story about an aborigine he'd met. Tried to sell him a share in a mine. The Dog Weary gold mine. That was it.'

‘What was his name?'

‘Oh, I don't recall that. Only the name Black Holland. It seems the abo killed him in a brawl over the ownership of the mine. I remember Rowlinson was full of it at the time, thought it a damned funny story.' And when I asked him whether the killing had happened locally, he said, ‘Oh, dear, no. Cooktown, I think. Rowlinson had just been to Cooktown to see where Captain Cook had repaired the
Endeavour
after she'd hit the reef.'

He couldn't tell me anything more, but when we got back to the homestead and I showed him the letter the stamp dealer in Sydney had given me, he agreed the aborigine's name might have been Minya Lewis. ‘Reck'n that's it. Welsh and Cornish miners, they were in on all the gold strikes, and the Palmer River was full of the stuff until the Chinks mined it all out.'

He could tell me nothing more except that there was an amazing graveyard out beyond Cooktown that included a Chinese burial place, also an old Edwardian hotel with frosted glass windows and a large wall painting that included some of the old-timers that still
hung around the bar. He had been there only once. Took the wife and kids up there, but it's a helluva journey unless you fly up with Bush Pilots Airways.'